Lottia limpets sitting on an experimental plate in the intertidal zone.

We recently had a new paper come out in Marine Ecology Progress Series, titled Quantifying the top-down effects of grazers on a rocky shore: selective grazing and the potential for competition (open access link at MEPS) (permanent doi link).

This project involved putting a series of round aluminum plates out in the high intertidal zone at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, CA, and allowing natural microalgae … Continue Reading

I’ve written in the past about iButtons and my attempts to waterproof them. Although iButton temperature dataloggers are fairly well sealed, they are not waterproof. But if you know an old person that used iButtons in the late 90s or early 2000s, they might claim that iButtons are absolutely waterproof.

It turns out that iButtons are one of those rare things in life that really were better when you were a kid. In the old days they could be put out in the ocean for weeks or months, completely bare, and most of them would survive just fine … Continue Reading

Last year I published a little paper showing how whelks (Nucella lapillus) drill through mussel shells at different rates depending on water temperature. This involved making hundreds of hours of recordings of whelks slowly scraping their way through the calcium carbonate shell of Mytilus edulis mussels in different water temperatures. The video above includes two examples of those recordings from two different snails of the same size, highlighted as red dots on the graph in the video, one taken at a water temperature of 9°C (48°F) and the second at 17.5°C (63.5°F). What you’ll notice … Continue Reading

It never hurts to collect more data, and I often find myself wanting to record temperatures from a few extra animals. Most (all?)commercialthermocoupledataloggersthatwillrecordtemperatures from multiple thermocouples cost several hundred or thousands of dollars. I set out to put together a relatively cheap 8-channel thermocouple datalogger based on the open-source Arduino development platform.

My 8-channel thermocouple datalogger. A single type-T thermocouple is plugged in to one of … Continue Reading